Break was welcome respite for Sun

When it came to how they spent the brief All-Star break, the Connecticut Sun’s Kalana Greene and Mistie Bass were on two different pages.

Marc Allard

When it came to how they spent the brief All-Star break, the Connecticut Sun’s Kalana Greene and Mistie Bass were on two different pages.

Bass tends to be more cerebral about things, taking in everything around her and analyzing the process.

“(The break) was really good for the mental aspect of the game,” she said, “to kind of reflect on you, yourself, and what you haven’t been doing enough or at all.”

Greene’s approach, more suited to her happy-go-lucky style, was to put everything to the side and clean the slate.

“Our lives are so consumed by what we’re doing at the moment, and when you have an opportunity to not worry about anything, get a breath of fresh air, and then come back, it was good to step away from it,” Greene said. “I did other things. I was busy in other ways, but I didn’t even concern myself with basketball. I didn’t think about (the game), didn’t work out, didn’t do anything that had to do with basketball.”

Whatever the approach, it apparently worked as coach Anne Donovan said the Sun (4-12) enjoyed “two really great days of practice.” Although enjoyed may be the polite, but not proper word according to Bass, who said if Wednesday’s practice was considered intense, “you should have been here (Tuesday).”

“What I saw (Tuesday) was a group that had bright eyes, were eager, had a lot of energy and pep in their step,” Donovan said.

The Sun will need all of that. They open the second half of the season at 7 p.m. today at the Mohegan Sun Arena against the team they played in last year’s Eastern Conference finals, the Indiana Fever.

The finals are the furthest thing from the minds of both the Sun and Fever (8-9), who are fighting to get into the playoffs.

The Sun will have to do so with a “new” point guard. Renee Montgomery, back after an ankle injury, will run the show tonight; Kara Lawson still is sidelined and is “still a couple of weeks out,” according to Donovan.

Even though the team largely is the same, especially with the return of Montgomery and Tan White from injury, the chemistry has not been there.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Bass said. “We have played together, but something’s missing. I think the idea coming back in the second half is that as bad as we were in the first half, there’s still a chance, if you can believe that. That’s the silver lining.”

To make that happen, the Sun will have to step up offensively. Donovan stressed the defensive aspect of the game throughout the first half of the season, but realizes a team has to score points to win. In their current three-game slide, the Sun have averaged only 58 points per game.

Teams are going to do exactly what Atlanta did last Wednesday to the Sun, commit the majority of their focus to center Tina Charles (18.3 ppg).

“We talked about realities (Tuesday), and the reality is that Tina is going to see a double- or triple-team every night, and how everybody else plays off that will be very important,” said Donovan, who added that it’s also important that Charles keep her composure when faced with it on a nightly basis.

“Atlanta did a great job with a smothering double-team, not only double-teaming (Charles), but making it hard for her to get the ball back out,” Donovan said. “We have two pieces to work on when that happens, Tina and her ability to get the ball back out, and then everybody else in our movement.”